Tuesday, 24 April 2012

It was when I witnessed
the staff at Brixton Cycles standing worried by a distraught customer that I first
appreciated the intense human dramas played out at the bike shop. The
woman had just been given some bad news about the cost of fixing her bicycle –
or the impossibility of repair. She collapsed into such hysterical sobs that
someone scurried off to the back offices to find a chair, sit her down and
offer her whatever the bike-shop equivalent of grief counselling is. I’m sure
they’d done everything they could.

It was only the
messiest of countless collisions I’ve witnessed in bike shops between people’s expectations
about the economics of cycling and the reality. Because it costs nothing to jump on a bike in the morning - and people forget that assets
require regular maintenance and occasional replacement - many expect it to cost nothing at all. I can’t pretend to be entirely bemused.
I open my wallet with something like gay abandon for the bike shop. But I never
quite remember that the same money is no longer available to replace trousers worn out by catching on mudguards or shirt collars worn out by
over-optimism about my neck’s fatness. I wander round for the most part in the
clothing equivalent of the squeaking, buckled-wheel bikes I encounter on the
roads – shirt collars frayed, trouser seats nearly worn through.

Yet one doesn’t
need to cycle for long in most western countries to encounter someone who
thinks cycling should be costing far more. This was roughly the view of the SUV
driver who came crowding into the cyclist-only advance stop area at a set of
lights one night on south London’s Clapham Road. As I tried to turn right
across the oncoming traffic, he should, I pointed out, have been behind me,
giving me space. “You don’t pay road tax!” he leant out of his window to shout.
It was an only slightly less sophisticated version of the argument that John
Griffin, the chairman of Addison Lee, London’s biggest private-hire car
company, put forward in a recent issue of his company magazine where he ranted about the danger cyclists posed and their failure to pay road
tax. "It is time for us to say to cyclists 'You want to join our
gang, get trained and pay up'," the chairman opined.

A beautiful, up-to-date bike: all in a day's work for
the market's invisible hand

Cyclists
consequently find themselves in some dark middle ground between the
paid-for-but-well-funded city of Motoring and the free-but-clearly-unchargeable
village of Disregarded Pedestrianism. Most are paying out far more to the
private sector than they might like to keep their bikes on the road – but
getting ever-lighter, ever-faster, ever more beautiful bikes in return. They are
meanwhile paying, in many people’s view, nothing for use of road networks towards
whose uptake most motorised users pay substantial annual taxes. They get in
return roads built almost wholly for non-cyclists, and the contempt or
antipathy of the police forces meant to keep those roads safe. A powerful headlight
is needed to illuminate this road. Who, if anyone, is getting ripped off here?
Could there be a better arrangement?

There is certainly
an irony about watching the smashing of free-market capitalism’s carbon fibre
road bike into liberal cyclists’ custom-built retro roadster at Brixton Cycles,
the bike shop that attracts the vast bulk of the Invisible Visible Family’s
substantial bike expenditure. The shop avers itself an opponent of normal,
capitalistic ways of doing things and is a workers’ cooperative. It is
festooned with the paraphenalia of anti-establishment urban culture. I’ve grown
so used to them I barely notice them. But, recently, as we left the shop the
Invisible Visible Girl stayed, her 10-year-old faced glued to a sign in the
window. “Daddy, what’s a Dykes on Bikes ride?” she asked.

The Invisible Visible Man's Surly Long Haul Trucker
He knows he's used this picture before - but suspects
others must enjoy gazing at it just as he does

Yet capitalism’s
genius for parting people from their money screams so loud from every corner of
the shop that even adverts for biking Lesbians can’t drown it out. I used 15
years ago to reach down to the bike’s down tube to change gears on my early
road bikes. When I bought my Surly Long Haul Trucker touring bike in late 2007,
I was delighted to find I could change gears between a choice of 24 with a sideways
flick of either the brake levers or little switches beside them. Two years later, I found
shifters for a mere 24 gears were no longer available. Instead, for much the
same price, I was offered seamless shifting between 27 speeds.

When I first
brought a road bike from Edinburgh to London in 1997, I had to glue in ineffective
Kevlar linings to protect them against puncture risks. Now, thanks to the latest Schwalbe Marathon Plus tyres, punctures are rare, landmark events. My
early road bikes’ brakes were neither strong nor easy to service. My Long Haul
Trucker boasts easily adjustable brakes that stop me quickly and efficiently
from a substantial speed – and that even a mechanical know-nothing such as I
can adjust. Twenty years ago, I wrestled with dim lights demanding heavy
batteries and apt to stop working suddenly. I now attract complaints from those
around me for the dazzling brightness of far smaller, lighter, less
energy-hungry lights.

Denmark's Henrik Norby with the Viva Bikes
the market tells him to design

The market’s
invisible hand has, in other words, fitted bike manufacturers’ products to
cyclists’ real needs as smoothly as a well-lubricated gear cable slips through
its cable housing. No mere bureaucrat, for example, could have anticipated the
sudden rush away from the order and progress of ever-improving gears into the
chaos of gearlessness. But the world has suddenly filled, without breakdowns in
supply or vast deliveries of unwanted bikes, the gearless, sometimes brakeless,
pared-down machines some of the public seem to want. Cycling advocates have no
need to pester the manufacturers to meet their needs. Whatever the market’s
shortcomings in, say, providing stable banks or creating just societies, it has
responded to cyclists’ changing whims as smoothly as a new chain and rear cassette mesh when bidden by STI shifters like those on my bike.

The transmission
between governments and cyclists’ needs works more like the
derailleurs on some unloved old mountain bike abandoned outside a town hall.
The reactions are either delayed or over-sudden, the outcome unpredictable and
everything accompanied by a great deal of squealing.

Rust clogs up the
mechanism. The sense that cyclists will never exist in large enough numbers to
justify significant spending fouls up many links along the chain. The feeling
that cycling is an optional extra sits like great blisters of rust on the rear
mechanism.

But undoubtedly the
most obstructive bit of rust - two great browny-red agglomerations around the wheels
that keep the chain taut - is the feeling that there somehow isn’t a stream of
money that justifies spending on cycling. It helps to make the police, largely
untroubled by insurance companies’ worries about the cost of cycle accidents,
apathetic. It helps to bore local politicians eager to shape dramatic new
junctions for cars, rather than dinky bike lanes. The outraged anger of people
like John Griffin or the man beside me on Clapham Road makes the politicians
scared of being seen to clean off the rust.

The problem takes
me on a mental journey to some outbuildings of Oregon State University, in the neat
college town of Corvallis. There the university some years ago devised equipment to charge cars for their road use in Oregon by a more rational method
than the simple gas tax. A meter, guided by a GPS beacon, would measure the car’s
mileage on Oregon’s roads and in the most congested area around Portland. Charges
would vary according to the time of day, the car’s carbon emissions and a range
of other factors. At fuel stations, an electronic pad would detect the meter,
knock the fuel duty charge off the driver’s bill and collect the required
road-user charge.

Oregon paid for the
apparatus I saw in Corvallis because fuel tax revenue, shrinking as car engines grew more efficient, no longer covered even the state roads' repair costs. Most
European countries try to cover the costs of new roads, accidents, pollution,
greenhouse gases and congestion as well. But, whatever the
approach, introduction of so much clearer and more
straightforward a charging system might, I think, have eased even the
Angry SUV Driver’s frustration. It would have been clear that he was paying for
the damage his SUV did – and that what he paid wasn’t covering everything. Most
transport economists even in heavily-taxed Britain think motoring tax receipts fall at
least £3bn short of covering all the costs motoring imposes. My taxes are already
helping to foot the bill for cars – it’s hard to see I should be charged, as Mr
Griffin wants, for using my bike as well.

An Addison Lee cab in traffic: price signals might
keep him in line

But it’s not
necessary to wait until everywhere adopts a system like the Oregon experiment –
which the state has now, sadly, abandoned – to see the magic of clear, strong
price signals working to protect cyclists. Cyclists swarmed on April 23 toAddison Lee’s offices to protest against Mr Griffin’s comments and demand
consumers boycott the company. The protest echoed a practice I’ve occasionally
adopted when harassed by a particularly aggressive taxi driver. If the driver
remains unrepentant after one complaint, I reach for the passenger window,
knock on it and shout to the occupant, “no tip!”.

It’s a tactic that’s never well-received and seldom calms down a confrontation.
But it’s hard to imagine that, if my knocking on the window prompts a stream of
passengers to leave a few more pounds in their purses, there won’t be at least
some change. The market’s invisible hand is unlikely immediately to make cars
as responsive to cyclists’ needs as bike manufacturers already are. But it could start nudging things imperceptibly towards the right direction.

Thursday, 5 April 2012

There were, I have to admit,
a lot of ideas that shocked me half a life-time ago at university. But one of my more wasted fits of the vapours was over a psychology lecture I attended about
Noam Chomsky’s ideas on grammar. It made no sense, according to Chomsky's theories, to imagine languages followed hidebound rules on whether infinitives could be split or what the accusative
of the interrogative pronoun “who” was. Languages instead
followed “derived grammars” – a set of principles that could be divined by
working out how the language’s speakers actually used it.

“Whom does he think he is
kidding?” my pedantic late-teenage self asked. “Who is he boldly to go into the
question like this?”

Yet,
however schocking I found the great Chomsky’s views, his ideas have been coming
back to me lately. In this blog, I’ve written a lot about how people should
think about cycling and other ways of using the roads. I’ve been looking at how
best to enforce de jure, written-down rules. For this blog, I'm changing perspective, looking around and trying to divine what Chomsky might call the “derived principles of
road use”. Forget what the rules say. How do people actually use the roads?

The principles I've deduced seem to me to do a far better job than any other explanation I've seen of dealing with some otherwise inexplicable phenomena I encounter on the roads.

The first of my Great Derived Principles of road use, for example, explains a mystery that's bothered me for some time. Why, I've often wondered as I watch some driver slalom around the road while using their telephone, are so many people willing to risk others' lives for the sake of a possibly entirely trival 'phone conversation?

A chilling warning - but only to motorists who understand
everyone else is real too

It's now dawned on me that hardly any of those drivers see the imbalance between the risk for other road users and their convenience in those terms. When using the roads (or undertaking quite a few other social interactions, for that matter) many people
simply don’t appreciate that other people are really real. They certainly don't feel they're real in the
complex, contradictory, emotionally and intellectually sophisticated way they
themselves are.

It’s going to be difficult, I
recognise, for some readers to accept this theory since it's coming from me and I, at the end of the day,
amn’t you. Some of you might have drawn different conclusions from my
confrontation a few weeks ago with the Angry Man of Clapham Road. It's entirely possible, I suppose, that the AMCR, who
took badly to being told not to drive into an area reserved for cyclists, fully understood his fellow road-users’ humanity. He might simply have
thought it reasonable to express his irritation by pulling his car, as I saw him do, across a cyclist’s path. Maybe he’d thought fully about the lives he would wreck if he seriously injured the man and still thought it worth making his point.

But ask yourself, I urge you,
this question: when did you last see someone else using the road who struck you
as as wise, sophisticated and intelligent a road user as yourself? When, by
contrast, did you last ask yourself, “What’s this idiot up to?” or mentally or audibly
shout some term of dismissive abuse at another person on the roads? If you’ve noted, say, half as many wise people as idiots, I grant that you have
your arms round the idea that other people are as real as you. For anyone else,
I fear you don’t. It is only natural, as far as you're concerned, to treat others' fears, concerns and complaints on the roads with both contempt and incomprehension. Which would be a problem only if everyone else also felt like
the world’s only real person and were using the roads on the same basis that
only he or she really mattered.

Many of you may
still, nevertheless, feel protected by another phenomenon I’ve spotted. Just as Billy Bragg
once sang, “Sexuality, your laws do not apply to me,” many of my fellow road
users seem to be humming something similar about old-fashioned Newtonian
physics (“Physics, I can see/ Your principles don’t work for me,” perhaps?).

It’s a tendency I first
observed when catching taxis around the cities of the Balkans a decade ago.
From Skopje to Sarajevo,
Bucharest to Belgrade, it was pretty much unheard-of to
find a taxi driver who, if one reached for the front-seat seatbelt, didn’t try
physically to restrain one, shouting, “No problem, meester”. There was no
need for a seatbelt, no need to ensure one’s body’s momentum wouldn’t carry one
on in a crash through the windscreen. I was in the care of one of the 99 per
cent of Skopje’s or Sarajevo’s
or Bucharest’s or Belgrade’s taxi drivers with above-average
driving skills – so above average, indeed, that they could prevent other people
too from driving badly around us.

A typically bucolic scene in post-war Kosovo:
special physics is keeping the farmers on the wagon.

Those special powers, I came
to realise, had been magically granted to many of the other drivers on the
roads as well. Early post-war Kosovo seemed to me to present an unusually wide
array of ways to crash. Kosovo Liberation Army foot patrols were apt to spring
suddenly from the roadside into one’s path, giving a simple “how-not-to” class
in running a vehicle checkpoint. Roads were apt to run out abruptly where a bridge
had been bombed. Some were simply very, very heavily bomb-cratered. But, when I
looked around, I noticed that pretty much everyone who wasn’t me or driving a
tank was seatbelt-free, protected by the magic of their special driving.

The principle applies beyond
the Balkans. Philip Hammond, the past UK transport secretary, argued that enforcement of road rules should no longer focus so heavily on
speed or persecuting the “law-abiding majority”. Instead, it should focus on
“anti-social driving”. The “law-abiding majority”, it seems, release less
energy when hitting another road user at 45mph in a 30mph speed limit than
someone imparting “anti-social momentum”.

Among cyclists, the
“suspension of physics” crowd have their adherents among what I call the
“chicken licken” cyclists – those I see cycling around wearing helmets with the
chinstraps undone. According to conventional physical principles, unattached helmets offer
excellent protection against the risk that the sky will fall. But, in any
actual, foreseeable crash, they would fly off, offering protection barely beyond the “lucky charm” level – “I’ll be safe because I’ve made a
gesture in the direction of being so”.

However, perhaps the surest
proof that some people think physics has been suspended is the persistence both
of in-line skating and the behaviour I encountered one afternoon on the Serpentine Road in London’s Hyde Park. The
road is generally a stressful place to ride because of its popularity as a
place for skaters to grapple with the fundamental problems of their means of
transport. Some lay out little obstacle courses; others practise skating
backwards. All fail to realise a means of transport where braking
automatically overbalances you doesn’t work.

This man, however, went a
step further. After a brief argument over how his sticking a skate into my path
had forced me to swerve, he started
shoving me. Given that the slightest return push would have sent him sprawling
to the ground, he either saw himself as above physics or saw the Invisible Visible
Man as a liberal wuss who would never dare shove back. The second idea is,
obviously, one we can safely discard. He thought physics was only for the little people.

Yet, for anyone who doesn’t
find it preposterously prattish, perhaps the appeal of in-line skating lies in
the Third Great Derived Principle of Road Use: that form is more important than
function, that it’s more important to be cool than safe.

A fixie at the Bike Show: this one
seems designed for looks
rather than function

One of the great exemplars of
this phenomenon is the recent popularity of certain kinds of fixed-wheel bikes
for road use. Many of these bikes lack brakes (albeit it’s possible to slow
down by pushing backwards on the pedals). All lack gears to match the
cadence of the rider’s pedalling to the bike’s current speed, the road gradient
and any number of other factors.

There are, granted, circumstances where such
bikes’ simplicity is an advantage (track racing, bicycle polo and, well, track
racing and cycle polo). But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that they’re
popular mainly because their clean, classic lines look cool. People are
prepared, as a result, to put on their knees the strain that gears would otherwise handle.

An SUV with tinted windows: not obviously sensible.

Drivers have been
following the "cool matters most" principle pretty much ever since Chrysler first stole a march on
Ford by coming out with a new model range every year. In south London, it’s a nightly occurrence to
encounter performance cars with windows so heavily tinted they must be nearly
opaque. Music blares out of many so loudly the whole car shakes. Navigating in
safety seems to be the last priority.

But it’s not just in their
kit that people show their desire to be cool. A pedestrian I encountered last
week in Waterloo
illustrated all three Great Derived Principles. He was too cool to look up as I
rang my bell at him and too unconcerned about the physics of the looming
collision to break his stride. Nor did he seem to grasp much why I might be
annoyed he’d made me swerve.

“Caaaalm dowwwn,” he said,
slowly and patronisingly when I suggested laughing at me might not have been
the most appropriate response to a mildly sarcastic reprimand.

Perhaps, however, that sums
up the conflict. I’ve spent years puzzling out the most rational way of getting
people to relate to each other on the roads. The vast bulk of road-users regard
my efforts with the same puzzlement as my efforts to keep the pronoun “whom”
alive or infinitives together.

With the grammar, I’ve long
since giving up on persuading others to agree. The encounter with the AMCR has
reduced my enthusiasm for making the point on the roads. It ended with his threatening,
fists raised, to assault me and my desperately calling the police. Call me a
coward if you will – I can’t quite face a beating over this gulf of
understanding.

About Me

I'm a hefty, 6ft 5in Scot. I moved back to London in 2016 after four years of living and cycling in New York City. Despite my size, I have a nearly infallible method of making myself invisible. I put on an eye-catching helmet, pull on a high visibility jacket, reflective wristbands and trouser straps, get on a light blue touring bicycle and head off down the road. I'm suddenly so hard to see that two drivers have knocked me off because, they said, they didn't see me.
This blog is an effort to explain to some of the impatient motorists stuck behind me, puzzled friends and colleagues and - perhaps most of all myself - why being a cyclist has become almost as important a part of my identity as far more important things - my role as a husband, father, Christian and journalist. It seeks to do so by applying the principles of moral philosophy - which I studied for a year at university - and other intellectual disciplines to how I behave on my bike and how everyone uses roads.